OAKLAND -- State Attorney General Kamala Harris made time to visit her hometown Thursday, with a cluster of reporters in tow, to congratulate East Oakland PRIDE Elementary School for their work in reducing chronic student absences, and to help bring awareness to the issue statewide.

"We all have been hearing about you PRIDE students in this school, and all of the good things you've been doing," Harris told a class of fifth-graders during a 10-minute Q&A session. "We've been hearing about how you go to school every day, how you take class seriously."

Since coming into office in 2011, Harris has tried to bring statewide attention to truancy in elementary schools, which is defined by the state as missing at least 10 percent of the school year with unexcused absences. Harris noted that California used to be one of only four states in the country that didn't track truancy and since then, her office has worked to publish annual reports that track truancy in young schoolchildren, as well as its root causes.

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What they found was unsettling: Tens of thousands of local schoolchildren were truant in levels as low as kindergarten. In Oakland, about 15 percent of elementary schoolchildren missed 10 days or more, with spikes of 20 percent or higher in the city's impoverished areas. Harris said that her office will continue to publish truancy reports as long as she's the attorney general, and she's championed a number of bills -- some that punish parents who allow their children to miss lots of school, and others that take steps to work constructively with families that have truant kids.

"When we connect the reality of elementary school truancy with associated factors, we know that we have a responsibility on behalf of principals and school districts, but also the community to be creative in how we're going to make those kids stay in school," Harris said. "Especially when we have transient families, when we have families that are moving from one school district to another, and we have simply a lack of knowledge about the significance of elementary school attendance to later achievement."

East Oakland PRIDE was likely chosen by Harris due to the fact that it has been able to reduce truancy schoolwide every year since 2011-12, when statistics on student truancy were first made available. Chronic absence has dropped almost 10 percentage points, from 14.8 percent in 2011-12, to 6.5 percent in 2012-13. Suspension rates have also fallen, and chronic absence among students of color, or kids who don't speak English as a primary language have also dropped in past years.

Newly appointed East Oakland PRIDE Principal Jacqueline Perl credited much of this success with work that was done before her appointment, but said her school takes a community-oriented approach to fight truancy, rather than targeting parents who are guilty of it.

"Our family research coordinator does a really good job of connecting individually with parents and families to find out what the root causes of the absences are," Perl said. "We try not to take a punitive approach, but rather a supportive approach. If the issue is a child's health, or the issue is transportation, we provide parents with resources such as bus passes or connections with free local clinics. The work is really about supporting families to get the kids to school, instead of pointing fingers and saying, 'You're not bringing your kids.'"

Harris' communications director, David Beltran, said that Harris spearheaded the issue because it relates to some of the root causes of crime. Reducing truancy now could help decrease statewide crime rates years later as chronically absent students grow older, he said.

"This issue is really an intersection of education and public safety," Beltran said. "Kids that are truant have lower reading levels, have an increased chance of being a high school dropout. Kids that drop out have a higher chance of being a victim or a perpetrator of crime."